This blog recently turned one year old. As with all milestones, we hoped to do something special (or, as our niece Hazel would say it, 'peshal') like bake a cake and write about the unexpected fruits of this little creative endeavor. The one year marker flew by, and to be honest we don't know which week it was. Our foremost intent with the Down Home Blog has been to encourage our own writing and photo-capturing in a format that prizes authenticity and maybe, hopefully, connects with a reader or two.

One year in, and you've watched us lose our colony of bees, get married on five weeks notice, quit our well-paying jobs and move to a farm in Vermont, struggle with the deep experience of watching our sister enter a religious order, move four times, travel to foreign countries, and the list goes on. If not for this space, we likely would not believe that all of these things happened in just one year. Life, in her Atlantic-sized mystery, beckons us to say Yes. We do our best.

So, today we will be driving Northward (our favorite direction): talking about our dreams, all of the things that move us, and—undoubtedly—a few menial topics (like why pilsner is such a good style of beer and when, if ever, I can finally have a pet bunny named Waffles). We're hitting the reset button. Our drive north is a tribute to saying Yes; a tribute to always choosing the road that's calling.